Spies. Unless one has been living under a rock for the last 50+ years, we’ve all seen a James Bond movie or two. Or, maybe you watched the classic Three Days of the Condor, or the Kevin Costner movie No Way Out from 1987, or any of hundreds of other spy movies from history. Or, alternatively, you’ve read any of hundred’s of books by authors like John le Carré, Frederick Forsyth, W.E.B. Griffin or Tom Clancy. Either way, you know what a “spy” is…Or do you?
Spying is as old as human civilization. One of the foundational duties of any government, as we understand the term, is to obtain information on potential threats to the community…because there are always threats. That’s just the way of the Universe.
Over time, of course, simple scouting evolved into what we think of as “espionage”. People volunteer to be spies for many reasons. They may be passionate patriots to their nation; they may be base and mercenary in nature, selling information to the highest bidder. Conversely, they could be traitors, operating against their own nation on behalf of a foreign power, for any of a number of personal reasons. The saddest figures are those entrapped into spying on their homeland, and not having the moral strength to go to their own government, turning in the enemy spies, and taking their licks for getting themselves into trouble.
Dedicated and loyal intelligence operatives – such as the fiction James Bond – whatever the nation or era, are recruited at relatively young ages, usually in their early-to-mid 20’s; frequently, they are military officers bored with their lives in the military. These recruits are almost always enticed by the ideas of excitement and adventure, but certainly not money – government spies are always just ‘government civil servants’, and are paid accordingly.
The reality that these officers face is that actually going “into the field”, or worse, “undercover” is invariably not only extraordinarily dangerous, but frequently unrewarding, as the dangers they put themselves (and sometimes, their families) into often result in no results, or even highly negative results…And that is before they have to face betraying local contacts to their fate, as happened in locating Osama bin Laden.
Traitors who spy against their own nations of their own accord (as opposed to those entrapped into espionage against their will) do so for many reasons, as well.
Sometimes, the willing traitor is outraged by their government’s actions of varying kinds. This was the case of Christopher John Boyce, who was outraged to discover – as an accident of his Top Secret clearance working with spy satellites for TRW – that the CIA was directly involved in undermining an Australian government that they did not like.
Likewise, Polish intelligence officer Michael Goleniewski – who also spied for the Soviet KGB on Polish intelligence – began spying for the West in 1959 after having, as he put it, a “Damascus-like” conversion event, where he realized how fundamentally wrong and evil the Communist system. Goleniewski revealed copious amounts of intelligence to the West on spies within the United States and British intelligence agencies. He was one of the most valuable spies for the West during one of the tensest periods of the Cold War. Unfortunately, claims persist that the CIA – for its own reasons – played enough “mind games” with Goleniewski that it drove him into mental instability, to the point where he is now primarily known for claiming to be the deceased Tsarevich Alexei, resulting in him being relegated to history as a crank.
However a spy is recruited, if that officer is not a “field agent”, they are usually relegated to the ranks of “analyst”, or a specialist researcher, focusing on a particular nation, region, group, or even a particular individual. Frequently, this involves using OSINT tools (some of which can be quite advanced) to glean information. The work is usually interesting for a certain type of personality, but is not what most people would regard as “spying”…even though it most certainly is espionage.
Those personality types who enjoy that kind of activity generally stay with an agency for decades. The levels of knowledge and information that they can accumulate during their years of service make them very “high value targets” (HVT) for hostile agencies to recruit. “Turning” a long-time analyst – whether for purely mercenary reasons, for political ideology, or just the raw excitement of stepping outside their boring “bullpen” world – is frequently the crowning achievement of a field agent’s career…If the traitor is eventually caught, that may be unfortunate for the traitor, but that will not usually weight too heavily on the conscious of the case officer.
The “case officer” is the closest thing in an intelligence agency to a movie spy. They are skilled at illegally entering a foreign country and conducting all manner of intelligence activities, including “running” a local asset who has volunteered to spy against their home nation. Sometimes, the will operate as “paramilitary officers”, conducting high-risk protection and/or extraction (such as evacuating an embassy when military special operations units are too far away to assist), training foreign armed groups (whether for a foreign government, or a group trying overthrow a foreign government), and possibly rescuing an HVT who has been captured.
There are also “legal spies”, who are placed within their nation’s embassy in a foreign nation, usually with an innocuous-sounding title, such as the “Second Assistant for Agricultural Relations”, or some such. These officers are usually the ones to receive communications from “walk-ins”, or locals wanting to offer to spy against their governments. They rarely, if ever, actually try to “run” a walk-in as an “asset”, merely evaluating whether the walk-in is worth the risk of assigning them to a case officer.
And, although no one wants to talk about it openly, allies frequently spy on each other, as happened with Israeli intelligence “running” CIA and US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard in 1984-1985. The revelation of the Israeli operation caused an immediate frost in relations between the US and Israel, something that happens frequently when intelligence operations are exposed, or “blown”.
Spying is far from a “glamorous” life. It is, unequivocally, a dirty, nasty proposition at any level outside that of the analyst’s cubbyhole in an office bullpen…and many times, even that it is not a “sterile environment”, because an analyst’s work can set in motion operations that are very “down and dirty”.
Watch the path in front of you carefully.